


Lovers' Meeting

by Thimblerig



Series: The Lion and the Serpent [38]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Feelings and that, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-21 00:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11346054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: “Journeys end in lovers meeting,Every wise man's son doth know.”





	1. Where are you roaming?

**Author's Note:**

> I'll apologise in advance for the short chapter length. It's just how they wanted to go. On the other hand, updates should be rapid...

As they wound through the narrow country lanes, Aramis and Constance talked.

“And then Alexandrine put me outside in the morning with her cats.” Aramis sighed dramatically. “All three of us shared a _very significant look_ and skittered off.”

“Oh dear,” said Constance, turning their little cart down a fork in the road.

“The lady knew what she liked,” he said equably, “and she had a lot of work to do that day. There was breakfast!”

“Well _that’s_ alright then,” Constance answered, rolling her eyes. “So long as there’s _breakfast._ Who next?”

“Tobias. He was a _cherub,_ truly, all pink cheeks and curly hair, whose chief involvement in a two-week con was getting happily married to a very nice young girl.” At her skeptical look, he expanded, “He came to me two days before the wedding and said, _‘Signor Barbiere’_ \- yes, I was a barber, I’ve seen a lot of close shaves - _‘Signor Barbiere,_ soon I will wed a maiden of wisdom, grace, and kindness and my greatest desire is to keep her as happy as she truly deserves. Can you show me how?’ My wicked heart was moved…”

He peeked under his eyelashes. Constance was a beautiful woman at all times, but when she blushed she was in addition _adorable._ “He was a very attentive student,” he said innocently.

“Oh, you,” she said, hitting him lightly on the arm, and he laughed. “Did you ever consider staying with one of them?”

Aramis was silent for a time. What might be the last of the sunshine that autumn walked behind a cloud and a few chilly drops pattered down. “I’m a bit of a stray cat,” he said at last.

Constance wiped a bit of water off her hand. “Do you mean that as in ‘always wandering’, or more like ‘looking for a home’?”

“Oh, you, asking the difficult questions… I had very good friends to travel with,” he said seriously. “One must never discount a good friend.”

She put her arm over his shoulders and pulled him into a sideways hug.

“We’re almost at the convent,” she said seriously. “Can you be brave?”

They both turned as the baggage in the back stirred and d’Artagnan’s head emerged from a rumple of blankets, with some of his black hair falling into his eyes. He blew it away and blinked up at Constance, his dark eyes warm and bright. “I dreamed I was in heaven,” he told her, “and then I woke up and it was even better.”

She smiled, eyes very soft, and smoothed a strand of his hair. “Hey, beautiful.” She leaned over and kissed the tip of his nose. His eyes drooped, then he surged upwards, kissing her on the lips.

Aramis looked away politely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There, see? Happy stuff!
> 
> Main and chapter titles are from "O Mistress Mine" in Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_.
> 
> Here's a link: https://youtu.be/h8kA2zx8isk (not the traditional tune, but definitely my favourite cover.)


	2. Oh stay and hear.

“Did you have to hit him?” Porthos asked, when they had slowed their horses to a walk by a small grove of trees. Jupiter steamed under him, hot against the chill autumn drizzle.

Athos touched the breast of his jacket as his horse paced along, heaving like a bellows, and felt the crackle of folded papers under the leather. “I think so,” he said breathlessly. “The pictures of the butterflies on Treville’s desk,” he tried to explain.

“The ones with the fortress maps picked out in ‘em,” Porthos expanded, nodding. “I recognised one from that copy we were handed out before storming Puigcerdà. And?”

“My wife’s handwriting,” Athos bit out. “It was on them.”

Porthos looked at him sympathetically. “They could’ve been old…”

Athos shook his head; his lips were white. “I would not bet on that matter.” He brooded as their horses walked. “He did not think to inform me that she was _alive?_ If she was sending him intelligence, did she tell him about Aramis also? How could he not -”

“Yeah,” said Porthos consideringly, “it’s awful when people don’t think you need to know information that affects you personally.”

Athos eyed him unhappily. “It’s not -”

“About me? I think it is.” His jaw tightened, then he sighed gustily, forcing his shoulders loose. “That first trip to Le Havre was operational security. I know. I understand.”

Athos waited, silent but for the jingling of his horse’s tack, the dulled _clop_ of Roger’s hooves.

“I would’ve stood by Aramis if he wanted to shout at Treville some,” Porthos said at last. “I know that.”

“He doesn’t remember -”

“I think he remembers enough,” Porthos said. “I’m trying to think of the last time our boy actually asked us for help,” he added thoughtfully. “I know we bailed him out of trouble plenty, but did he ever ask?”

Athos adjusted his gloved hands on his reins. “I ordered him not to speak of… what happened at the convent.” He trailed off, still superstitious of saying it out loud.

A few drops of rain dripped off the front of Porthos’ wide hat and he adjusted it with a determined tap of his hand. “I was never jealous when you came along,” Porthos said at last, “even though you were drunk and a pampered rich boy. Aramis had a lot of fancy lovers, and a lot of folk who called themselves friends, but I was the one he trusted with his nightmares. I thought I was.” Jupiter shook his head and neck, and the water in his mane flicked up into Porthos’ face. He wiped it off calmly.

He remembered that strange, unhappy feeling that had crept up one autumn, run ragged with missions outside the city and somehow always missing rotation onto staid palace duty. Aramis had been hectic, near raucous in the inbetween times, and if he shot a lot of worried glances Athos’ way, well, their friend had had a bit of a shock with his wife. What reasoning man wouldn’t be shaky, after a brush with Milady de Winter, and who wouldn’t think to check on him?

And yet, and yet, with all the _joie de vivre_ Aramis had showed… something had been off. Porthos wondered, if the sea stopped listening to the moon, how long before the bright lady noticed. When would that knowledge start to twist her heart?

“‘I will always stand by Treville,’ I told him that once.” It was a soldier’s answer, where loyalty and quick obedience were sometimes all that could keep a man alive. "He took me at my word.”

“Porthos,” said his Captain seriously, “if the worst you can say about your relationships is that a friend thinks twice before dragging you into an uncomfortable conversation, _you are winning.”_

Porthos glared at him.

Athos stared back, impassive.

Porthos chuckled ruefully. "Eh, I'm starting to see your point there."

They passed a small grove of trees and spied the convent near _Bourbon-les-Eaux,_ perched like a pocket fortress on a small hill. He eyed the high walls critically. "That's a fair way a man can fall."

"Then we shall be there to catch him."

**

In a high narrow room Ana Mauricia de Austria, Queen of France, turned to the young novice that hovered in the doorway. She twisted her fingers in the grey wool of her habit and said, "Madame d'Artagnan is here to call on you."

Ana's shoulders eased, and an uncomfortable knot of tension under her ribs loosened. "Then please send her in, Agnete." 

"Yes'm." Agnete bit her lip. "There's company."

The Queen straightened her back. "Of what nature?"

"Is it a Musketeer?" de Winter cooed from where she rested, propped up on pillows. "It's been _so long_  since I've been lectured on my wicked ways..."

Agnete glanced at her, and at the glass in her hands, then desperately at the Queen.

"You may go," she said calmly.

"I'll-fetch-your-afternoon-tisane-Y'Majesty," the girl blurted out, and fled.

"I throw _one_  cup..."  de Winter drawled lazily, twirling the heavy glass tumbler in her fingers, eyes hooded.

"Have you considered, not throwing them at all?" Ana inquired, keeping her face grave.

"Where's the fun in that?"

There was a soft cough from the doorway and de Winter's glass fell from suddenly nerveless fingers, to roll in decreasing circles on the stone flags. Ana turned back to the entrance.

She had had deportment lessons as a small girl, hour upon hour of training in seeming calm and balanced at any crisis. As reflexive as a trained fencer falling into a stance she did so now, back straight as a string of pearls, hands folded in front of her, chin up.

"Your Majesty," said Aramis from the doorway. He put his hand on his heart and bowed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // Some of this chapter took its form from a comment by TheLoveThief on Hard Roads 3. Credit where credit is due.
> 
> // _If she was sending him intelligence_ \- to be fair, the intelligence packets were turning up at random and contained such gems as ‘sorry I watched you get shot in the back’ and elliptical comments about a stray kitten. I really don’t blame Treville for not wanting to get into any conversations lightly. (I thought I was going a bit too far with Treville’s secret-keeping, but hey, s3 showed me that my feet were still on the True Path.)
> 
> **
> 
> I rewatched _Twelfth Night,_ what with the song running through my head like a sweetly poignant earworm...
> 
> ...
> 
> Captain Flint?!
> 
> (It's not just the different hair; Toby Stephens is _really good_ at changing up his voice for the part. I have an audiobook where he brings a lot of gravel to Phillip Marlowe. But still - well-played, sir.)


	3. That can sing both high and low.

Ana stood straight as a candle in the little convent room and considered the man she had thought dead, the father of her child, the man she had grieved for.

Aramis was tall (she’d forgotten how tall!) and, in the plain, elegantly cut black doublet he wore, looked thin as a wand, as a strip of old bone, oddly bare without the steel weapons that had been his profession. His hair was wild, barely restrained by a scrap of blue ribbon; there was a new scar dully red on his face. He was pale under his tan.

He stepped into the room, two paces, and bowed gracefully, the full obeisance due to royalty, his eyes respectfully lowered.

“We had thought you dead, Aramis,” Ana said softly.

After a beat he straightened. “It was a close run thing, Your Majesty.”

“I should have known,” Ana heard from the sickbed by the wall. Sour and raucous as a crow, de Winter added, “some people just _don’t die.”_

The faintest hint of a smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. “The devil’s luck, Your Majesty, Madame.” His voice was just as she remembered: light and yet rich, musical in the shortest of statements. He squared his shoulders and said then, formally, “I thank you, Your Majesty, most profoundly, for the kindness you have done my... partner.” 

“I thank you for the service you have done my homeland,” she said gravely, “both of them.” Her eyes flickered. “You are still recovering from injury.”

“Indeed, Your Majesty, though I am much improved.” 

He stood patiently, eyes calm, as she gently touched the hinge of his jaw. “Does it still hurt?”

A flicker in the corner of his mouth. “Perhaps a little headache. It is kind of you to ask.”

She stepped back, her dull brocade skirts rustling. “I have business with the Mother Superior. I will leave you.”

Aramis stepped to the side and watched as his monarch, delicate, grave, and regal, moved to the door of the plaster-walled convent room. Bare-headed as she was, she held her head as if it bore a crown.

He bowed again, eyes on the floor. “Your Majesty?” She paused with her hand on the door frame. “If there is any service I might do you,” he said, straightening, “or your children, simply name it.”

Her rosebud mouth curled sweetly, and her cheeks dimpled. “I may hold you to that.” He inclined his head. 

When the Queen had left he sat primly on the stool by Madame's bed and beckoned peremptorily for her bandage-covered hand. When he had unwrapped it and observed the healing that had occurred - the woundrot gone, but still pink and weeping - he said blithely, applying new salve, “Everyone knows left-handed witches are the best kind.”

“Look at you,” she said, smiling horribly, “always looking on the bright side. How did you survive?”

“Kitty,” said Aramis, wrapping the hand. “The maid followed us after all. She got my wheezing corpse to shelter somehow… I woke up one morning and she was crying, and I knew that everything was going to be alright.”

“That was -”

“- Kitty the Maid for you,” they both chorused. 

She watched him sit back on the little chair, prim and proper. She distracted his attention with a glance to the door and then, when he looked that way, her good hand closed around his throat and forced his head back. “What was that about with the Queen?” she enquired. “I've seen you twinkle more for beggarwomen.”

She felt stubble and the lump of his Adam’s Apple work against the palm of her hand as he swallowed. “Are not the destitute deserving of affection, also?” She squeezed lightly. “It would not serve,” he breathed at last. “I draw fire to her simply by being in the same building. They are… safer, with distance.”

“So you got your head back,” she answered dryly. 

“To an extent,” he answered softly. After a breath he added, “If a man were to thank a lady for helping him in his hour of need...”

“She would tell him to stow it. I got plenty of use out of you.”

“It is agreeable to be useful,” he said equably. “So you've had your foot set upon the throat of an empire. Was it all you wanted?”

“Aramis,” she said, “I left you to die.”

He shrugged. “I understood.”

“Maybe that isn't about you.”

“I understand that, too.”

She released her hand and he rubbed his throat, wincing slightly. “And you’re just going to walk away…”

“Even so.”

She dropped a kiss on the top of his head. “You're a fool, Aramis.”

“Always,” he answered, voice cracking. 

In the simple stone corridor d'Artagnan leaned against the wall, one arm wrapped around his ribs, chewing on his thumb, listening awkwardly to the sound of ugly, broken sobs coming through the door. He cast dark eyes to where the Queen stood on the other side of the arch. 

She raised one dainty finger to her lips then, back straight, her head lifted high as if to bear a crown, she paced away down the corridor. She made it almost to the corner before - like a candle that had burned too long - she staggered, and hunched, and melted into Constance’s arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry. Can I get you a handkerchief? (I have a nice one in cambric somewhere, hang on.)
> 
> Next chapter should be up tomorrow.


	4. Pretty sweeting.

Athos hovered, seized by a diffidence he thought long since departed, his fingers barely touching the rough wood of the door frame to the convent room.

“I can see your _shad_ -ow…” he heard in a sweet and venomous sing-song. His head dropped against the wood and he made himself breathe. 

The voice changed into something brisk and practical. “You can come in, you know. I don’t bite… much.” He settled his weight and moved. He could do this.

“... Anne…?”

He used to think of her as a white doe, carried out of the woods on a faerie wind. In that first intoxication of knowing her, that lovely, serene woman, ardent and with the soul of a poet, he had not questioned how little of her past he knew. That she was barely known in Pinon and that her forgettable brother the Curè had quietly disappeared not long after the wedding had seemed only right and appropriate. Village Curès were not the stuff of such tales.

After - long after - comparing the tales of d'Artagnan, Ninon, and Constance, recollecting all those times he'd thought he'd seen the ghost of his wife in the gait of a woman pacing away down the street, or smelled her perfume in an empty room, heard the echo of laughter… he'd known her for a rose bush, possessed of blood red blooms one had to reach for even as the thorny canes wrapped and tore.

Sitting in the bed she was haggard, face hollowed out by recent fever and her skin stark and pasty, the pearlescent glow she used to carry quite gone. Scraps of roughly cropped hair, lank with oil and old sweat, draggled on her forehead. One hand, her right, was wrapped in bandages that should have been bulky but, sickeningly, weren't. 

The other hovered over Aramis who rested in that familiar ragdoll sprawl, draped awkwardly half on the bed, with his head resting against her hip and one arm flung across her legs. White fingers arched, and hooked... 

They dropped and carded gently through his hair. 

She looked up, smiling crookedly. “‘Anne’ will serve for today.” Carding her fingers again through his hair, she said, “He falls deep, when he sleeps. Speak as you like.”

“He said you were good to him.”

“Athos,” she answered patiently, “if you come into possession of a good horse, you look after it. You pull the stones out of its hooves, you feed it decently, you cater to its little whims if they aren't too much trouble - it's only common sense.” Her fingers moved, gentle as one petting a cat. “I was good to you as your wife and I would have been good to d'Artagnan, if he had not gamed against me. Hmm, perhaps I should move onto the other one, Porthos.” She twinkled. “I could complete the set, and see how that works out.”

“Badly,” advised Athos. “His friend has seen hard use, and he takes that quite personally.”

She tutted softly. “I've always enjoyed a challenge.”

“Anne,” said Athos wearily, “I have no heart for playing games.” 

She gestured with her maimed hand around the stark walls of convent room. “I've nothing else to do.”

“Would you tell me how he came to you?”

"He fell from the sky,” she purred, “a little gift from God, a half-drowned bat, a benighted traveller…”

“On a hill road in Asti?” Her eyelids dipped in affirmation. “The lost treaty draft.”

“You’re a sharp one.”

“Hardly, every man and his dog was looking for it. What happened then?”

“I spirited him off entangled in my hair,” she said. 

“Less embellishments, please.”

She picked up his arm by the wrist, waggled it, then let it flop back down with a light thump to the sheet. “Something like that.” She shrugged and, one-handed, undid the cuff of his sleeve, pulling it back to bare the forearm. “He was thinner than this at the time, all string and wire. He'd taken a recent beating. Plumped out like an autumn nut soon enough, but he came to me pasty white.” She turned his wrist so the palm was visible, “Callus and abrasions, some old, here. Barely serviceable clothes and haircut. No shackle galls, but -”

“Confinement,” continued Athos. 

She nodded, slipping her thumb under the scrap of filthy ribbon knotted around his wrist and rubbing lightly. 

“When did you realise he was wandering?”

“I'm not… chatty,” she said sulkily. Athos swallowed back an ill-advised laugh. She glared with eyes green as gooseberries. “It isn't as if we had a vast hoard of shared jokes and experiences, Athos. What was I supposed to do, preface every comment with, ‘Remember those times I tried to kill your friend?’ or, ‘When I saved you from death on the wheel, what you said to me...’ Bah. What a terribly gauche conversational topic. And he was not himself talkative.” She sniffed. “There are times I have treasured the lack of inquiries into whatever recent disaster I've made of my life. And he was so very, pointedly, useful in my affairs. By the time I realised he wasn't all there, it was far too late to throw him back.”

A small, pained whimper escaped the sleeping man's throat, caught by whatever sleep threw at him, and she rubbed gently at the line between his brows until it smoothed. “It's only common sense,” she repeated. Then she sighed, looking away. “No-one ever asked me for sanctuary, before.”

“Were you lovers?” he asked.

She smiled, looking at him through her eyelashes. “Would it matter, if we were?”

“I don't know,” he answered honestly. 

“He's slept in my bed more times than you ever did,” she said, voice silky. “Cleaned off my blood and bound my wounds. I know the crinkle around his eyes when he's trying not to laugh, and the set of his mouth when his head hurts worse than usual. I've picked him off church steps when he fetched up there like a lost child and trusted him to fire around me in the heat of a melee. I've listened to his nightmares. With all that, Athos, how much does it matter if I parted my knees for him or he settled between them?”

Athos considered her silently.

Absent minded, she smoothed Aramis’ hair again, and said, almost clinically, “He’ll try to become what he thinks you want. It's a useful skill, in a spy.”

“You really think that's all there is to him? Nothing but a mirror?”

She shook her head, smiling. “No. But I know a fellow skin-changer.” She huffed. “I've never met a good man more convinced that he was damned.”

“Anne.” He could feel his voice breaking as it left him. _“What do you want?”_

Her eyes met his, green as a little spring hidden in the forest, still and clear and full of wishes.

“I don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _The lost treaty draft… every man and his dog was looking for it._ \- one very minor plot device so it isn’t _quite_ so much of a reach that Milady, Porthos-and-d’Artagnan, and Aramis, were all in the area on the same night.


	5. What’s to come is still unsure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait - I've been a bit ill, and lacking in brain.

Porthos leaned against the low parapet and looked out over the small hills and scrubby forests, dyed very green against the grey sky.

“You found your ‘Madame’,” he said dryly, “all safe and snug.”

“Ish,” Aramis allowed. “She’ll be on bedrest for a few weeks yet. Infected wounds aren’t happy things, Porthos.”

“Oof, remember that time at the waters of Forges?”

“Mn. And then Athos -”

“Yeah,” Porthos snorted. Meditatively, he added, “So this is where it happened.”

“Where what happened?”

Porthos glanced at Aramis, who stared out at the autumn-soaked landscape, his gaze affable and blank.

“Where… they… organised the relief effort.”

“Aren’t the nuns grand? I think I’m in love with the Mother Superior,” Aramis said lightly.

“You always loved a good woman -” Porthos bit his tongue.

“And there are so many in the world.” Aramis smiled. His long fingers skipped along the stone of the parapet. “Sometimes if you love them, if you really love them…” his voice trailed off and Porthos remembered an ancient conversation on the garrison stairs, after Aramis and Athos had finally, _finally_ revealed the affair with the Queen. _Sometimes the best thing you can do is pretend it never happened,_ he finished silently. He’d been torn, then, between the urge to beat his friend until he whimpered and, simply, the need to hide him from the world until it stopped hurting him. Aramis’d had such speaking eyes, that day. One wondered how he ever kept it secret at all.

“The sun is going down,” Aramis commented, looking out at the world.

**

“What’s this?”

Milady - his wife - Anne-for-today fumbled with a roll of heavy parchment wrapped in bright blue ribbon, just delivered by a shrinking, pale nun.

The fingers of her left hand snagged the knot one last time before she put the thing aside and looked away, two spots of colour bright in her cheeks.

“If I may?” Athos unknotted the tape and stretched the roll of papers open. They were covered in densely written legalese and heavy wax pendant seals. She ignored them, dignified as a cat who had taken an unexpected fall.

“I saw the maps in Treville’s office,” he said hesitantly.

She grinned, wickedly. “Pretty, were they not?”

“How much did he pay you?”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “He didn’t. The gifts were more by way of… insurance. It’s always better to be worth a little more alive than dead. To as many people as possible.”

He remembered the feints and double-feints at the end of one summer; Madame Bonacieux kidnapped as a last, hidden card to play. Constance had diffidently confessed to nightmares once and asked him how to cope… he’d begged her not to use wine. He remembered the weight of Anne’s hair in his fist in the heat of the night, the rich smell of it wound inextricably with the reek of fear on her skin and the sourness of the wine. No ghost, now: her body had been hot and solid as he held her against him, and she had trembled.

Once it was unthinkable he might handle a woman in that fashion. 

“What happened?” she asked curiously. “You were so very… milky, when we married.”

“I don’t know.” He looked down at his hands, the knuckles of his right grazed red. “I killed you and the world cracked open. Or perhaps I was always like that and I only needed to find the man inside. My father had a temper, Anne. Not like mine. Have you ever scared yourself?”

“Oh yes.”

He glanced up. Her eyes were soft and wondering. Slowly she pressed one finger to her pale lips and then to a spot between his brows. It tingled as she sat back.

“Thank you for looking after my friend,” he said formally. Her nostrils flared in indignation and he startled them both with laughter.

“I didn’t do it for _you,”_ she snapped.

“I know,” he said softly. “Nor for France.”

“I flipped a coin,” she said, grinning horribly, “when I picked which side in the war I’d play for.”

“It is as you say,” he said politely.

She scoffed at him, then picked idly at the legal papers. “What is this?”

He ruffled through them, skimming through the fussy legalese. “A patent of nobility, and a grant of land.”

“... Excuse me?”

“Congratulations, Comtesse de Bragelonne.”

“Treville wants me to disappear and never bother him again, is that it?”

“Perhaps,” Athos answered, checking the Minister for War’s seal at the bottom. “You might… like… rusticating in the country. It’s good land - the area is known for its trout streams, and its orchards.”

“I’d burn it down, fish, apples, and all…”

“The Queen countersigned it.”

“Tch, did she?”

**

“What’s next for you?” Porthos asked. “Going to cool your heels with - I will be honest - that poisonous snake of a woman?”

 _“The way of the serpent on the rock,”_ Aramis quoted, smiling quietly, _“the way of a woman with a man._ I always thought her more of a lioness, as it happens: clever and hardworking, inclined to hunt her own food. But, no. I will be leaving here tomorrow.” Porthos’ heart leapt - re-enlisting with the Regiment? After a time, Aramis said, “I promised Treville I would run an errand for him before the snows set in.” He looked out over the empty land, fingers twitching as if looking for a gun to clean.

“You want company?” Porthos asked.

Aramis’ eyes shut. “You don’t have to,” he said quietly. “It’s a bit of a nightmare, really.” His fingers skittered on the stone.

“Where are we going?”

“Ah,” said Aramis diffidently. He rubbed the back of his neck. Then shrugged. “Savoy?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, we haven't got to the Happy Ever After yet. But maybe people know each other a little bit better, yeah?
> 
> There will be a bit of a hiatus before the last story arc - I'd like to get it at least mostly complete before posting. That said, there might be one or two one-shots popping up.
> 
> I hope I did not tease you too much.
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me!


End file.
